HoodaThunk?

“Self-evident” not so evident to some

Brian Kirwin at Bearing Drift has a must-read post up today on the topic of the truths our Founders considered to be self-evident and the people who, today, have lost all connection with that. It starts with a quote out of his local paper’s Letters to the Editor section wherein a local resident demonstrates her complete ignorance of our rights, the Constitution, and which came first.

The letter writer takes issue with the assertion of former Governor Mike Huckabee and Newt Gingrich that the rights of Americans come from God and asserts, herself, that they come from the Constitution. Kirwin needs to look no further than the Declaration of Independence to blow holes in that argument and does so. He continues:

This slow but steady diminishing of the religious base for our system of government has troubled me over the years. I tire of the public schools who teach that Patrick Henry said “give me liberty or give me death” but refuse to acknowledge that he spoke those words in St. John’s Church.

I shake my head when children are taught about Thanksgiving and denied from knowing exactly who was being thanked. (I actually had a public school teacher tell me the first Thanksgiving was when the Pilgrims thanked Native Americans)

And I’m outraged when people understand so little about what made the American experiment great that they think that government gives us our rights.

There was a time when every American – and I do mean every one of them – was expected to know the opening lines of the Declaration and the preamble to the Constitution. If they did, letters like the tripe that made it into Kirwin’s local paper would never appear, or would never appear without immediate correction. (I wonder if the paper hadn’t included the ability for readers to make rebutting comments to letters to the editor if they would have seen fit to make the rebuttal themselves. Or would they have simply let this letter be published, fallacious as it is, and allow the rest of their readership to be influenced by it?)

June 9th, 2009 Posted by ricjames | Politics, Virginia Politics | no comments